IBM’s design thinking practice extends across its diverse portfolio of products and services. Forrester Consulting conducted a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of IBM’s design thinking practice on their organizations. Data was gathered from interviews with four IBM clients and 60 executive survey respondents.
Forrester concluded that IBM’s design thinking practice has the following three-year financial impact: $48.4 million in benefits versus costs of $12 million, resulting in a net present value (NPV) of $36.3 million and an ROI of 301%.
IBM helped accelerate projects, increase portfolio profitability, and streamline processes
Forrester quantified the following key risk-adjusted benefits, which are representative of those experienced by the organizations interviewed:
Project teams achieved profits and savings of $20.6M by doubling design and execution speed, delivering $678K per minor and $3.2M per major project.
- Organizations slashed the time required for design and alignment by 75%
- Project teams leveraged better design and user understanding to reduce development and testing time by 33%
- IBM’s design thinking practice helped projects cut design defects in half
- Faster time-to-market enabled increased profits from net-new customers and the higher present value of expected profits
- Organizations reduced risk and improved product outcomes, driving an increased portfolio profitability of $18.6M for the composite
- Discovered and invested in projects that had the highest profit opportunity
- Minimized the risk of failed projects, or muted adoption, by weeding out poor investments that may not have paid off
- Designed better products that resonated with users to increase adoption, retention, satisfaction, productivity, and sales
- Cross-functional teams collaborated to share problems and find solutions, reducing costs by $9.2M in streamlined processes.
What were your organization’s top three priorities or business objectives for introducing design thinking?